Ondorkhaan, the breaking point. - 21 July - 25 July.
Journal Entry for 22 July, 2011:
Out of Ulaanbataar, now stuck in Ondorkhaan in Khentii aimag. We got in yesterday at 13:00; unfortunately the bus for Batshireet left at 8 that morning. The next bus is on Monday, again at 8; we tried a bit yesterday afternoon and evening to get a ride, but after several hours of effort got only 2 offers, neither of which we were willing to pay, the charges being exorbitant. So, we wait till Monday, and camp till then. A few things of note about yesterday, though: we met an American woman whose name we never learned, who’s working as a photographer with an NGO working with the American Military, who in their turn are working with Mongolian doctors in capacity building. So there’s quite a few American soldiers about town, though they mostly keep to themselves.
Also, at one point while searching for a radio station to put an ad out to hire a jeep to Batshireet, I was put on luggage-guard duty and PB went a-wandering; but, while I was waiting, I met an elderly scientist named Dolmaa, who spoke some English and was very interesting and helpful. She studies fish and fish ecology and works at the Academy in Ulaanbataar. She told me about the Mongolian trout which can vary greatly in size and tastes very good. She also helped translate while we were trying to figure out a ride to Batshireet provided by a friend of a friend of a very trashy lady in a see-through turquoise lace top barely able to contain her bulk, with a lady in green with a young son with delicate blonde hair who were also apparently from Batshireet. But Dolmaa had to leave before the deal was concluded, so she didn’t see it fall through due to outrageous pricing. She did seem to think it might be dangerous for us to camp, but we had no problems last night. If we are lucky we will be left alone tonight as well, but we’re in a different place and it seems much busier so we’ll see.
Also yesterday we met two lovely little girls in the Post Office / Telecom Office / Bus Station, named as near as I can remember and translate, Naimiin (7) and Namiinjiin (8). I played ‘catch-the-bottlecap’ with them with my hat (also: PB & I bought hats) for some time and we had great fun, the younger definitely being the more outgoing. Oh, and one last story: at dinner yesterday a young girl, maybe 3 or 4, who’d been playing quite cheerfully in the main eating area disappeared into the kitchen and started screaming terribly; it turns out she’d somehow hurt her foot, burned it, actually. PB and I felt very bad and rummaged around for something that would help her in our first aid kits. All we could find was an anti-septic wipe with painkillers and aloe in it, but we gave them that, at least. Poor kid, she was too young to really know what had happened or why it hurt so much. And then, as we were walking away, the older girl who’d been in there ran after us and forced 300 mnt (Editor’s Note: MNT = tgr = Tugrik) into my hand. Strange day.
Today has been much lazier and less eventful, resigned as we are now to staying here the next few days. In the morning we lazed around the tent; in the afternoon we lazed around an internet cafe ( well, I lazed; PB taught himself some Korean) and this evening we lazed around in the river, which is generally shallow but quite swift. Anyway, as can probably be guessed from my penmanship now, it is too dark to easily write. I hope we will be generally left along this night, or, failing that, unharmed, and I will write again when writing is worth it.
Goodnight.
Storytime!
Writing would not prove worth it for some few days. Although we had met the photojournalist on our first unwilling afternoon in Ondorkhaan (which was apparently renamed Chinggis City in 2013, although the Mongolian Cyrillic on Google Maps still clearly spells Ondorkhaan), we never saw her again, and, despite catching the odd glimpse of American fatigues over the next few days, our time in Ondorkhaan was spent glorying in what can most kindly be called the Authentic Mongolian Experience.
We were camping as there was not a hostel to be seen, but also because the land was flat and grassy all about the town, with only the Kherlen River to the South interrupting with its short sandy banks and muddy burbling. The weather, it must be said, was beautiful: sunny and mild and unfailingly pleasant. Given all these, then, it should be no wonder that, after the first night spent not far from the bus terminal, we set up camp near a bend in the river, the easier to leave the tent and go swimming. Well, paddling, anyway; the Kherlen, though swift, is too shallow at that point for an adult to swim properly.
For children, though, it is apparently the precise right depth. On the day before we were to buy tickets and catch our bus (as we had been assured by the counter attendant that tickets were never sold in advance), PB had gone again to the town's internet cafe and I had stayed in the tent to alternate between napping and paddling in the river. Suddenly, around midday, in the middle of one of my river paddling sessions, I was stumbled upon by a group of 4 young boys, about 8 or 9 years of age, the same age group I had taught when I lived in Hong Kong.
Now, one thing that I have found to hold true almost everywhere in the world is that kids are always kids. There's not a huge amount of regional variation on the the nature of childhood, particularly of childhoods spent without much money. It seems to take either a huge amount of unconscious wealth or the horrors of puberty to really change or disguise the natural fecklessness and curiousity of the average child. So, with my own childhood spent by the Mackenzie and Liard Rivers of Northern Canada on top of my year of teaching in Hong Kong to help me bridge the adult-child gap, I hit it off with the kids right away.
None of them spoke much English, of course, and my Mongolian was limited to a scarce handful of words, but they didn't seem to mind and we made do with miming and facial expressions. Always appreciative of a fresh audience, the boys insisted I sit and watch as they took turns jumping off the small bank into the river, or sliding down the bank, or semi-swimming in the muddy water. I kept up my end of the bargain by clapping when appropriate and keeping up a steady stream of smiles, laughter, and commiseration at failed attempts at different stunts.
Even without understanding the language, different personalities soon became clear. There was a quiet, confident one who seemed the understood leader of the pack. Not the tallest or the loudest, still whenever there seemed to be a discussion going on, it was his statements that turned it into action. The others all looked at him whenever he spoke.
There was a noticeably smaller one, perhaps a younger brother, who the others treated with a rough affection and thoughtlessness. He mostly seemed to be overjoyed at his inclusion in the group, and could be counted on to vehemently support whatever was going on, be it laughter or jumping in the water or what have you; but during discussions and arguments would fall silent and hang back, not daring to venture an opinion.
The third was the tallest, with a round head and small eyes that, for some reason, made me think he likely wore glasses when they were available and his parents could force him into them. He was chatty enough with the other boys but shy and deferential with me. He had a ready laugh and seemed good natured; it also turned out he had a decent memory for his classroom English lessons and was called upon by the leader to translate the odd words or phrase. In these instances the leader seemed to trust his answers, acknowledging them with a curt nod that would bring a small smile of pride to the boy's face.
The fourth was the clown. Wild and unpredictable, keen for attention, he laughed the most and spoke the loudest. He attempted for brashness and bravado, but nearly fawned on the leader of the pack. Something about him, I'm not sure what, made me think back to my experiences in Canada; I could not banish the assumption that he came from a poorer or otherwise different family in the town. Something about him screamed that he was seen as different by the other boys, by himself, but that he had been included in this afternoon's activities because of this comparable age, and now he was desperately enjoying himself and wildly grateful to be given the chance to be among them. I sympathised, and I wondered what his home was like, but I didn't quite trust him.
After an hour or so, the boys tired of the water, and, through the leaders presumptuous miming, I was given to understand that they wanted to see where I slept. I obediently took them back to the tent, which was just large enough to house one adult and 4 kids if the door was open. Rather complacently I let them rummage around my few belongings, keeping PB's clothes and precious camera equipment safely tucked into the corner behind my back. This is when the little academic proved his worth. While his leader was flinging imperious questions at me via mimes and the help of our small pocket dictionary, it was the academic that was given the task of filling in the gaps. He acted as a translator for both the leader's questions and my answers, while the wild child and the younger brother contented themselves with murmurs of astonishment or agreement while going through my few mementos... and my multivitamins, which they immediately assumed were candy. I decided it probably wouldn't hurt them to not be corrected on that front, and so they were each treated to a multivitamin. They were apparently unimpressed with the quality of my "sweets" as there were no requests for seconds.
The questions were largely about where we had been, what China was like, and where we were from. They seemed interested in Canada, and I was able to show them a small map and point out the city I lived in. They commiserated with me about the cold, apparently their winters were cold, too. They tried to tell me how cold, but I couldn't understand the numbers. They were horrified by this, and the next 15 minutes were spent in me dutifully repeating the numbers 1-10 in Mongolian until they were satisfied. They had significantly less trouble in learning the English numbers. This knowledge established, they insisted on exchanging phone numbers. I tried to ignore my flashback to The Simpsons episode where Bart calls Australia, and dutifully recorded their phone numbers on a little scrap of paper.
Eventually the stream of questions ebbed, though, and, as the day was growing long, they soon turned for home. They had only walked about 20 or 30 feet away though, when, waist deep in the tall grass, they stopped and huddled around the wild child. I saw the face of the academic glance at me, his expression troubled and unhappy. Sensing trouble was afoot, I stood up and faced them with the pretence of waving them goodbye. The little group abruptly broke apart and, after a moments hissed excitement from the wild child to the leader, the wild child was shoved forward while the other three shamefacedly hung their heads and peeked out at me from the corners of their eyes.
"Hey - Kiss?" yelled the wild child.
Ah, I thought. So that's what this is about. I raised a wry and slightly disapproving eyebrow and shook my head, no.
More hissed excitement, but this time the wild child shoved himself forward and yelled,
"Hey - Sex?"
followed by gales of shocked laughter. I figured I didn't want to know where he had learned that word, and just shook my head again, trying to look more disapproving. Finally they moved off, and I lounged in the tent until PB came back, overall feeling pretty pleased with the afternoon.
The next morning we awoke before dawn with the intention of being at the bus depot at the earliest possible moment in order to assure being able to purchase bus tickets to Batshireet. It was only while I was packing up that I realised that I was missing 10 mnt and several Chinese jiao (cents, essentially) notes, as well as the wristwatch I had bought in the Temple Street Night Market in Hong Kong, which had broken within days. The little shits had stolen from me.
Strangely, it's the only time I've ever been robbed. Period.
Anyway, warmed by my outrage, we finished packing up and headed to the bus station. PB was the first one inside. I sat outside with our bags, waiting for the sun to fully rise. After nearly 45 minutes, he came back outside, tight with anger. The tickets were sold out, he said. Somehow, despite OUR not being able to purchase advance tickets, all the tickets had been sold in advance. The next bus was on Thursday, which would give us no time at all to be able to explore as we had planned and still get back to China before our Mongolian visas expired. With PB frustrated to no end with the infrastructure and my upset at having my things stolen, and no real other option anyway, it did not take us long to give up on our Mongolian venture and decide to head back to the capital and from there continue immediately to China.
For that bus, at least, there were still tickets. We left that afternoon.
2015/09/25
2015/09/18
an Ecdemic Cat. Asia 2011.
Mongol Uls 14 July - 20 July, 2011
Director's Cut for 20/07/2011:
Been a while since I last wrote. We’re still in Ulaanbataar. We’re staying in a hostel that’s nice enough, though there’s only one bathroom for 2 floors. The day we got in we met up with a bunch of people from Stepperiders and had really nice Indian food. Unfortunately I threw it all up a few hours later; all that night and the next day I was terrifically sick. I was still weak the next couple days, but am better now. I suspect it was the marmot.
Despite all this, we at least now have a good idea where we want to go, and will (hopefully) be on our way tomorrow. We will go East, first to Ondorkhaan, then north to Batshireet near the Russian border. From there we will trek to Khan Khentii Strictly Protected Area, in the hopes of seeing the insides of some of the bathhouses apparently in the area. We hope the trek will take about a week, all told, and then we will make our way back to Ulaanbataar, and from there to Beijing, Shanghai, and, eventually, Korea, where PB will stay and I will leave.
Storytime:
Getting out of Ulaanbataar was not, in itself, particularly difficult. Certainly it was not the ordeal that getting into it from China had been; however, because we had decided to go to the Khan Khentii Strictly Protected Area, we thought we needed some sort of authorisation. The guide books and tour resources we found had conflicting information, and no one in the various hostels we talked to seemed to know much about it either. But, one rainy morning after I had recovered sufficient strength, we ventured out to the building we hoped would contain both information about the adventure we had planned as well as permission to do it.
At the time, as I stated above, the plan was to go east to a decent sized town called Ondorkhaan by bus (that being the only way to get there), then north to a smallish town called Batshireet on the Russian border, again by bus. From Batshireet we hoped to hire horses or a car to the Strictly Protected Area. At the time, however, the information we had indicated that a permit was needed to both get into the protected area, and, potentially, even to stay in a town so close to the Russian border. But reliable information on either subject was sparse and contradictory with next to no information available online (I'm told it's different now), so at last we figured the most efficient method was to head to the government office responsible for such permits and get it sorted out there.
It took at least one urban bus and a fair bit of walking to get to the government office, and so we were treated to the spectacle of Ulaanbataar without its habitual cloak of blue skies and brilliant sunshine. The city is built in a sort of valley-like hollow around the junction of two rivers, the Selbe, which flows into the city from the direct north, and the much larger Tuul, which flows through the southern edge of the city from east to west. The geography means that the centre of the city is fairly flat, but if you head to the south you run into the city's most recognizable geographic feature, the mountain Bogd Khan Uul, and if you head to the north you hit the edge of the hollow and face a steep climb upwards until you find the lip of the plateau again. Our destination was to the north of the city centre, and so we found ourselves slogging a fair way uphill over sporadically incomplete sidewalks. The rain was steady but not torrential, and did nothing to improve the look of the several grimy-looking gers (again, the Mongolian yurt) that huddled within the edges of the city limits. Still after much walking, and much walking around construction that had spilled over onto sidewalks, we found the building.
It was a sleek glass and metallic affair, low to the ground and dark blue in colour. The parking lot in front of it was in disarray, of course, but the vehicles parked on the soggy, uneven dirt patch were modern and shiny and dark. Overall, the building gave the distinct impression of having money and being very serious indeed... As did the guardbox and 10 foot high, razor-wire topped, chainlink fence surrounding the entire affair. Daunted but unwilling to be put off, we approached the guardbox.
A good hour and a half later, we walked away. Not only did we not have permits, we hadn't even been let inside. No information was available - at least, no information in English - and the greatest achievement of our quest had been to serve as entertainment for some bemused looking army officials as they walked through the yard of the building, cozily on the other side of the fence.
Frustrated and soggy, we wandered away, eventually finding a main street to take us back to the city centre. As we wandered south and downwards, dodging around loose paving stones and open pits now cheerily lit by fresh sunlight, we wondered how to proceed. The address we had been given was pretty unambiguous, and matched exactly the numbers on the unreachable blue steel building we'd been barred from entering. On the other hand, the book that gave the address was about 4 years old; perhaps it was out of date? Did that mean there was a different office we needed to go to, or simply that permits were no longer required? Were we willing to take that risk? If Mongolia deported us, would we be sent back to China or to Canada?
Pondering these and other questions, we wandered into a two-level restaurant for lunch. Decorated exclusively in unrelieved dark wood panelling, it was dimly lit and offered traditional Mongolian fare. The lower level was occupied by smoking Mongolians who looked askance at us as we entered. Being already mentally exhausted with the days efforts and unwilling to face further scrutiny without at least a hot meal to lift our low spirits, we retreated to the unoccupied benches upstairs. The obviously startled waitress handed us menus that were low on pictures (a Chinese affectation we agreed made food purchase exponentially easier) and had English transcriptions, rather than translations, of the menu items, although each section (Entrees, Vegetables, Soup, Meat, etc) was labelled in several different languages. We both decided on soup as the best remedy for the chill of the day and ordered at random.
Waiting for our mystery soups, we huddled over the ubiquitous Mongolian tea, heavy with the traditional milk and salt. As the warmth seeped into us, we began to draw a sort of stubborn courage. If the address had changed, and no new one supplied, wasn't it possible that the policy had been changed as well, we argued? Surely if the policy was still in affect, someone at the hostel, either staff or fellow guest, would have known about it, and none had. Besides, we were not going for very long; besides that, if we found out at the entrance that permits were necessary, we could turn back, or perhaps even purchase them at some office there. We mullishly decided that if we were unable to apply for permits, we would assume none were necessary and would depart, as planned, for Ondorkhaan in 4 days time. Bolstered by these arguments, not even the lackluster nature of the soup could bring us low again, despite the fact that PB's consisted literally of 2 tablespoons worth of shredded mutton in what appeared to be unseasoned water, rather than broth. Mine, at least, had some shreds of noodle and onion.
The rest of our time in the capital was spent pursuing traditionally tourist excursions. We visited the Museum of Natural History, which was ok, the National Museum of Mongolia, which was very good, and the Winter Palace of the Bogd Khan, which was small and somehow sad but also very enjoyable in its slight dilapidation and faded glory. We also went to the Chojin Lama Temple Museum and caught a performance of Tuvan throat singing, which I would absolutely recommend. And, 4 days later, we packed our bags and headed to the eastern bus terminus of the city, where, despite the delay caused while disputing the fare of an unscrupulous "taxi" driver, we caught a simple long haul bus east to Ondorkhaan.
Director's Cut for 20/07/2011:
Been a while since I last wrote. We’re still in Ulaanbataar. We’re staying in a hostel that’s nice enough, though there’s only one bathroom for 2 floors. The day we got in we met up with a bunch of people from Stepperiders and had really nice Indian food. Unfortunately I threw it all up a few hours later; all that night and the next day I was terrifically sick. I was still weak the next couple days, but am better now. I suspect it was the marmot.
Despite all this, we at least now have a good idea where we want to go, and will (hopefully) be on our way tomorrow. We will go East, first to Ondorkhaan, then north to Batshireet near the Russian border. From there we will trek to Khan Khentii Strictly Protected Area, in the hopes of seeing the insides of some of the bathhouses apparently in the area. We hope the trek will take about a week, all told, and then we will make our way back to Ulaanbataar, and from there to Beijing, Shanghai, and, eventually, Korea, where PB will stay and I will leave.
Storytime:
Getting out of Ulaanbataar was not, in itself, particularly difficult. Certainly it was not the ordeal that getting into it from China had been; however, because we had decided to go to the Khan Khentii Strictly Protected Area, we thought we needed some sort of authorisation. The guide books and tour resources we found had conflicting information, and no one in the various hostels we talked to seemed to know much about it either. But, one rainy morning after I had recovered sufficient strength, we ventured out to the building we hoped would contain both information about the adventure we had planned as well as permission to do it.
At the time, as I stated above, the plan was to go east to a decent sized town called Ondorkhaan by bus (that being the only way to get there), then north to a smallish town called Batshireet on the Russian border, again by bus. From Batshireet we hoped to hire horses or a car to the Strictly Protected Area. At the time, however, the information we had indicated that a permit was needed to both get into the protected area, and, potentially, even to stay in a town so close to the Russian border. But reliable information on either subject was sparse and contradictory with next to no information available online (I'm told it's different now), so at last we figured the most efficient method was to head to the government office responsible for such permits and get it sorted out there.
It took at least one urban bus and a fair bit of walking to get to the government office, and so we were treated to the spectacle of Ulaanbataar without its habitual cloak of blue skies and brilliant sunshine. The city is built in a sort of valley-like hollow around the junction of two rivers, the Selbe, which flows into the city from the direct north, and the much larger Tuul, which flows through the southern edge of the city from east to west. The geography means that the centre of the city is fairly flat, but if you head to the south you run into the city's most recognizable geographic feature, the mountain Bogd Khan Uul, and if you head to the north you hit the edge of the hollow and face a steep climb upwards until you find the lip of the plateau again. Our destination was to the north of the city centre, and so we found ourselves slogging a fair way uphill over sporadically incomplete sidewalks. The rain was steady but not torrential, and did nothing to improve the look of the several grimy-looking gers (again, the Mongolian yurt) that huddled within the edges of the city limits. Still after much walking, and much walking around construction that had spilled over onto sidewalks, we found the building.
It was a sleek glass and metallic affair, low to the ground and dark blue in colour. The parking lot in front of it was in disarray, of course, but the vehicles parked on the soggy, uneven dirt patch were modern and shiny and dark. Overall, the building gave the distinct impression of having money and being very serious indeed... As did the guardbox and 10 foot high, razor-wire topped, chainlink fence surrounding the entire affair. Daunted but unwilling to be put off, we approached the guardbox.
A good hour and a half later, we walked away. Not only did we not have permits, we hadn't even been let inside. No information was available - at least, no information in English - and the greatest achievement of our quest had been to serve as entertainment for some bemused looking army officials as they walked through the yard of the building, cozily on the other side of the fence.
Frustrated and soggy, we wandered away, eventually finding a main street to take us back to the city centre. As we wandered south and downwards, dodging around loose paving stones and open pits now cheerily lit by fresh sunlight, we wondered how to proceed. The address we had been given was pretty unambiguous, and matched exactly the numbers on the unreachable blue steel building we'd been barred from entering. On the other hand, the book that gave the address was about 4 years old; perhaps it was out of date? Did that mean there was a different office we needed to go to, or simply that permits were no longer required? Were we willing to take that risk? If Mongolia deported us, would we be sent back to China or to Canada?
Pondering these and other questions, we wandered into a two-level restaurant for lunch. Decorated exclusively in unrelieved dark wood panelling, it was dimly lit and offered traditional Mongolian fare. The lower level was occupied by smoking Mongolians who looked askance at us as we entered. Being already mentally exhausted with the days efforts and unwilling to face further scrutiny without at least a hot meal to lift our low spirits, we retreated to the unoccupied benches upstairs. The obviously startled waitress handed us menus that were low on pictures (a Chinese affectation we agreed made food purchase exponentially easier) and had English transcriptions, rather than translations, of the menu items, although each section (Entrees, Vegetables, Soup, Meat, etc) was labelled in several different languages. We both decided on soup as the best remedy for the chill of the day and ordered at random.
Waiting for our mystery soups, we huddled over the ubiquitous Mongolian tea, heavy with the traditional milk and salt. As the warmth seeped into us, we began to draw a sort of stubborn courage. If the address had changed, and no new one supplied, wasn't it possible that the policy had been changed as well, we argued? Surely if the policy was still in affect, someone at the hostel, either staff or fellow guest, would have known about it, and none had. Besides, we were not going for very long; besides that, if we found out at the entrance that permits were necessary, we could turn back, or perhaps even purchase them at some office there. We mullishly decided that if we were unable to apply for permits, we would assume none were necessary and would depart, as planned, for Ondorkhaan in 4 days time. Bolstered by these arguments, not even the lackluster nature of the soup could bring us low again, despite the fact that PB's consisted literally of 2 tablespoons worth of shredded mutton in what appeared to be unseasoned water, rather than broth. Mine, at least, had some shreds of noodle and onion.
The rest of our time in the capital was spent pursuing traditionally tourist excursions. We visited the Museum of Natural History, which was ok, the National Museum of Mongolia, which was very good, and the Winter Palace of the Bogd Khan, which was small and somehow sad but also very enjoyable in its slight dilapidation and faded glory. We also went to the Chojin Lama Temple Museum and caught a performance of Tuvan throat singing, which I would absolutely recommend. And, 4 days later, we packed our bags and headed to the eastern bus terminus of the city, where, despite the delay caused while disputing the fare of an unscrupulous "taxi" driver, we caught a simple long haul bus east to Ondorkhaan.
2015/09/11
a Dziggetai Cat. Asia 2011
Horsepower 09/July - 13/July
As we stepped off the train in Ulaanbataar we were swallowed by the crowd of jostling, over-burdened Mongolians all come to the capital for the Nadaam national holiday. We few bewildered foreigners floated through the surge, bobbing through the press like pale, befuddled icebergs. PB and I were rescued by our San Franciscan friend yet again, as she convinced her hostel shuttle driver to drop us off near the Irish pub where we were to meet our tour guide. Why is there an Irish pub in the middle of Ulaanbataar? That's a great question. We were told it was due to the Mongol Rally, although apparently the rally departs from England, not Ireland.
At any rate, we arrived at the pub around 11 am, having completed our journey with about 3 hours to spare. Our ride was actually an hour late and begged the excuse of traffic when they did arrive; once we got into the car and underway we understood why. Driving in the capital city of Mongolia is an exercise in patience, problem solving, and sheer bloody-mindedness. The city, which at the time of our visit had recently celebrated reaching a population of a million, was caught in an intense bout of growing pains as the burgeoning mining economy demanded more infrastructure, mobility, culinary choice, and corporate luxury than the traditionally livestock-centric, recently post-Soviet culture was gracefully able to provide.
The result of the tension between these 2 forces was a city fabric unevenly woven, with some parts bulging and robust, and others fraying, stretched thin, and snarled. Roads were well laid out and intuitive in 4-block radius's that didn't align with one another, accompanied by sidewalks that appeared and disappeared at random in an astonishing spectrum of building materials and states of repair. The road itself showcased all possible levels of being, varying from asphalt to gravel and all evolutionary stops in between. Traffic lights and street signs were like shooting stars - rare, valuable, and sporadically catastrophic for those affected by them. Still, after a couple hours we managed to escape the city and made it to the Stepperiders camp.
Actual journal entry for that day:
~Later~ So, yeah, as planned got picked up by Stepperiders in Ulaanbataar and were taken to their camp. I was still mildly sick by that point, though luckily the brunt of it had passed. Good thing, too; the next day saw us on a 40 km ride across the steppe to where the Nadaam camp is, a total of 7 hours in the saddle, with maybe one cumulative hour's worth of breaks thrown in. (Editor’s Note: There was almost definitely far more breaks than that, but if certainly didn’t feel like it at the time.) I originally named my horse, a dark male, "Curmudgeon", as it seemed he mostly wanted to stand still. I later shortened this to Curmy, after he’d proven his worth by trotting, cantering, galloping, and even jumping (twice!) with seemingly great pleasure. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been above a trot. At first it was glorious. Even being, as I know I am, basically a jouncing sack of potatoes in the saddle, the feeling you get in a full gallop across the open steppe is truly wonderful. By the end of the day, however, I was so exhausted, and in so much pain, I was almost crying out in disappointment every time we saw a ger (a Mongolian yurt) that turned out to not be ours.
Eventually we reached camp, however, and were well fed. With the aid of hot food and a mixture of vodka and airag - neither of which, if truth be told, I particularly enjoy - I slept both soundly and well, despite our ger’s floor being drenched by the rain that followed us in. The next morning (this morning) we again rode out, this time to see a Nadaam race. These are done by children on young horses and are anywhere from 10 to 20 km. The ride to and from the race track is no more than about 45 minutes, which was nice as we trekked out again in the afternoon. The weather has thankfully been clear, I am dreadfully sore but not as much as I was yesterday, our companions are pleasant and the food has proved palatable. PB and I have just hiked to the top of the nearby hill, where I am writing now; the sun is setting over the steppe and it is time for dinner. So far, so good.
13/07/2011 (I think) It’s been a good couple days. After last writing we had a day which was much the same, but livened in the evening by a game one of the other guests, Julian [french; with Irish Penn], brought called Jungle Fever. This was played, originally, by Julian, Max [American; WHO; hipster], Andreas [Norwegian; with Janet], Erika [American - Japanese; translator; funny], PB, and myself. It’s a brilliant game, I will try to remember to buy it back in Canada. Eventually Andreas & Janet had to leave to return to Norway after 19 months of travelling; shortly after that Jungle Fever was turned into a drinking game and we included Niumka, our smiling Mongolian guide, and Ryan, a bearded, kerchiefed American, in the mix and drew a small crowd of bemused Mongolians, including Puche, god of horses in a white fedora, and his singing, tough-as-nails wife Ganaa. Eventually the game ended, and after watching some Mongolians wrestle, it was further expanded and moved inside the ger. PB was already out for a walk and night had fallen; the game was less interesting with so many people and I went for a ramble in the hills as well.
The moonlight was stunningly beautiful on the mountains, almost bright enough to read by - which I suppose makes sense, it’s been near a month since the beach at Hong Kong. I rambled around, ostensibly in search of PB, mostly just walking and looking. Although the moonlight drowns out much of the stars, it limns the hills in silver, the light and shadow looking for all the world like gilt and velvet. I was offered a ride by a man in a pickup driving on no road that I could see, but walked on until I’d come half circle around our Nadaam camp and then headed back.
Next morning we rode back from whence we came. I had a different saddle, and my stirrups were much shortened; when we galloped it was all I could do to stay on. Eventually I got off and lengthened the stirrups myself (Editor's Note: This is notable because I did it poorly and inefficiently while dropping far, far, behind the others), which helped somewhat. Unfortunately I was still leaning too far back in the saddle and had a bad time of it for awhile. I smartened up after lunch and leaned more forward and found it much better and easier to keep my seat. We galloped almost all the way home. [Editor's Note: This meant we fulfilled the major goal of the Mongolian excursion, galloping across the steppe into the sunset. Boo-ya]
That evening Ryan apparently missed his guitar and, subsequently, a vocal guitar was created, consisting of Erica, Max, Andre [New York but in HK; with bald Marco], and Cat [British; speaks Russian, head band]. It was pretty excellent. After dinner was wrestling again. I beat Erika twice and Cat once, and was beaten twice by Penn. We also invented horse racing, basically running uphill while carrying someone in piggyback. It was very popular, as was its variation which had the horses and riders switch at a half-way point. Erika, Max, PB & I shared a ger and made fun of Max for a while and went to sleep. When I woke up, I found my lower lip had swollen overnight to about twice its normal size, apparently having been sunburned the day before. I actually napped most of the morning, after seeing the remarkable way Mongolians kill and butcher a goat, and woke up in time to eat it. The killing and butchering were very interesting though; everything was very clean and efficient. What will stay with me the most, however, was how Sina, the slightly sleazy camp helper, was holding the head and forelegs of the dead goat as its insides were being scooped out into a basin, reached out a gnarled hand and very gently stroked the eyes of the goat closed.
It is only mid afternoon now, or perhaps late evening. We have been treated to more wrestling, this time in the traditional uniforms, and got to see competitors of all ages and skill levels duke it out. I smell of grease and apparently we are also having blowtorched marmot. As long as Erika can stop pretending she’s drunk and we can save Cat (not me; other, British, Cat) from sleazy Russian-speaking Mongolians, it promises to be an interesting last night here.
As we stepped off the train in Ulaanbataar we were swallowed by the crowd of jostling, over-burdened Mongolians all come to the capital for the Nadaam national holiday. We few bewildered foreigners floated through the surge, bobbing through the press like pale, befuddled icebergs. PB and I were rescued by our San Franciscan friend yet again, as she convinced her hostel shuttle driver to drop us off near the Irish pub where we were to meet our tour guide. Why is there an Irish pub in the middle of Ulaanbataar? That's a great question. We were told it was due to the Mongol Rally, although apparently the rally departs from England, not Ireland.
At any rate, we arrived at the pub around 11 am, having completed our journey with about 3 hours to spare. Our ride was actually an hour late and begged the excuse of traffic when they did arrive; once we got into the car and underway we understood why. Driving in the capital city of Mongolia is an exercise in patience, problem solving, and sheer bloody-mindedness. The city, which at the time of our visit had recently celebrated reaching a population of a million, was caught in an intense bout of growing pains as the burgeoning mining economy demanded more infrastructure, mobility, culinary choice, and corporate luxury than the traditionally livestock-centric, recently post-Soviet culture was gracefully able to provide.
The result of the tension between these 2 forces was a city fabric unevenly woven, with some parts bulging and robust, and others fraying, stretched thin, and snarled. Roads were well laid out and intuitive in 4-block radius's that didn't align with one another, accompanied by sidewalks that appeared and disappeared at random in an astonishing spectrum of building materials and states of repair. The road itself showcased all possible levels of being, varying from asphalt to gravel and all evolutionary stops in between. Traffic lights and street signs were like shooting stars - rare, valuable, and sporadically catastrophic for those affected by them. Still, after a couple hours we managed to escape the city and made it to the Stepperiders camp.
Actual journal entry for that day:
~Later~ So, yeah, as planned got picked up by Stepperiders in Ulaanbataar and were taken to their camp. I was still mildly sick by that point, though luckily the brunt of it had passed. Good thing, too; the next day saw us on a 40 km ride across the steppe to where the Nadaam camp is, a total of 7 hours in the saddle, with maybe one cumulative hour's worth of breaks thrown in. (Editor’s Note: There was almost definitely far more breaks than that, but if certainly didn’t feel like it at the time.) I originally named my horse, a dark male, "Curmudgeon", as it seemed he mostly wanted to stand still. I later shortened this to Curmy, after he’d proven his worth by trotting, cantering, galloping, and even jumping (twice!) with seemingly great pleasure. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been above a trot. At first it was glorious. Even being, as I know I am, basically a jouncing sack of potatoes in the saddle, the feeling you get in a full gallop across the open steppe is truly wonderful. By the end of the day, however, I was so exhausted, and in so much pain, I was almost crying out in disappointment every time we saw a ger (a Mongolian yurt) that turned out to not be ours.
Eventually we reached camp, however, and were well fed. With the aid of hot food and a mixture of vodka and airag - neither of which, if truth be told, I particularly enjoy - I slept both soundly and well, despite our ger’s floor being drenched by the rain that followed us in. The next morning (this morning) we again rode out, this time to see a Nadaam race. These are done by children on young horses and are anywhere from 10 to 20 km. The ride to and from the race track is no more than about 45 minutes, which was nice as we trekked out again in the afternoon. The weather has thankfully been clear, I am dreadfully sore but not as much as I was yesterday, our companions are pleasant and the food has proved palatable. PB and I have just hiked to the top of the nearby hill, where I am writing now; the sun is setting over the steppe and it is time for dinner. So far, so good.
13/07/2011 (I think) It’s been a good couple days. After last writing we had a day which was much the same, but livened in the evening by a game one of the other guests, Julian [french; with Irish Penn], brought called Jungle Fever. This was played, originally, by Julian, Max [American; WHO; hipster], Andreas [Norwegian; with Janet], Erika [American - Japanese; translator; funny], PB, and myself. It’s a brilliant game, I will try to remember to buy it back in Canada. Eventually Andreas & Janet had to leave to return to Norway after 19 months of travelling; shortly after that Jungle Fever was turned into a drinking game and we included Niumka, our smiling Mongolian guide, and Ryan, a bearded, kerchiefed American, in the mix and drew a small crowd of bemused Mongolians, including Puche, god of horses in a white fedora, and his singing, tough-as-nails wife Ganaa. Eventually the game ended, and after watching some Mongolians wrestle, it was further expanded and moved inside the ger. PB was already out for a walk and night had fallen; the game was less interesting with so many people and I went for a ramble in the hills as well.
The moonlight was stunningly beautiful on the mountains, almost bright enough to read by - which I suppose makes sense, it’s been near a month since the beach at Hong Kong. I rambled around, ostensibly in search of PB, mostly just walking and looking. Although the moonlight drowns out much of the stars, it limns the hills in silver, the light and shadow looking for all the world like gilt and velvet. I was offered a ride by a man in a pickup driving on no road that I could see, but walked on until I’d come half circle around our Nadaam camp and then headed back.
Next morning we rode back from whence we came. I had a different saddle, and my stirrups were much shortened; when we galloped it was all I could do to stay on. Eventually I got off and lengthened the stirrups myself (Editor's Note: This is notable because I did it poorly and inefficiently while dropping far, far, behind the others), which helped somewhat. Unfortunately I was still leaning too far back in the saddle and had a bad time of it for awhile. I smartened up after lunch and leaned more forward and found it much better and easier to keep my seat. We galloped almost all the way home. [Editor's Note: This meant we fulfilled the major goal of the Mongolian excursion, galloping across the steppe into the sunset. Boo-ya]
That evening Ryan apparently missed his guitar and, subsequently, a vocal guitar was created, consisting of Erica, Max, Andre [New York but in HK; with bald Marco], and Cat [British; speaks Russian, head band]. It was pretty excellent. After dinner was wrestling again. I beat Erika twice and Cat once, and was beaten twice by Penn. We also invented horse racing, basically running uphill while carrying someone in piggyback. It was very popular, as was its variation which had the horses and riders switch at a half-way point. Erika, Max, PB & I shared a ger and made fun of Max for a while and went to sleep. When I woke up, I found my lower lip had swollen overnight to about twice its normal size, apparently having been sunburned the day before. I actually napped most of the morning, after seeing the remarkable way Mongolians kill and butcher a goat, and woke up in time to eat it. The killing and butchering were very interesting though; everything was very clean and efficient. What will stay with me the most, however, was how Sina, the slightly sleazy camp helper, was holding the head and forelegs of the dead goat as its insides were being scooped out into a basin, reached out a gnarled hand and very gently stroked the eyes of the goat closed.
It is only mid afternoon now, or perhaps late evening. We have been treated to more wrestling, this time in the traditional uniforms, and got to see competitors of all ages and skill levels duke it out. I smell of grease and apparently we are also having blowtorched marmot. As long as Erika can stop pretending she’s drunk and we can save Cat (not me; other, British, Cat) from sleazy Russian-speaking Mongolians, it promises to be an interesting last night here.
2015/09/04
a Cacotopic Cat. Asia 2011
The Train North 06/July - 07/July
On the seventh of July, 2011, I sat on one of four mattresses in a room where 5 people were staying, my back to the wall, my feet hanging over the side of one of the 4 beds, and wrote the following disgruntled entry in my journal:
"7 July:
So, we’re in Zamiin-Uud. It is a podunk border town with neither charm nor utility.
Here’s what happened after I last wrote.
At around 9pm we arrived in Er Lian. We got off the train in the hopes of buying a ticket to continue on. As we walked out, though, it occurred to us to maybe ask the train attendants whether we could just stay on for a fee and we turned back. As we did we saw another Westerner, a woman of about 5’ 1’’ with freckles and brown-red hair tied back in a ponytail. We decided to ask her if she knew whether we could buy tickets on the train, but it turns out she was going to stay the night there and continue on to Zamiin-Uud by jeep in the morning. We asked if she’d like to share a jeep, as this seemed a good cost-saving idea. We agreed, and left the station.
We’d thought there would be taxis in the station parking lot, and perhaps some hotels, but there was nothing. Instead we decided to double check whether we could buy train tickets and started wandering in search of a ticket counter at the same time a bunch of Isrealis who we’d met on the train, and a bunch of other Westerners, poured out the station doors as well. It turns out that the train we were on was the trans-siberian, and they ditch the hard-sleeper cars when they hit the border; if you want to stay on till Ulaanbataar, you have to pay luxury prices, about 1000 yuan. So we all went into the international ticket hall, and then had to come back out and leave our bags, then go back in through a scanner, to try and buy tickets.
Except none of the ticket counters were open. In fact, nothing was open, and after a flurry of activity caused by the baggage scanner turning back on and us having to scan all our baggage, nothing at all happened for the next 15 minutes except discussion. 'T', the girl we’d met earlier, who turned out to be from San Francisco, and PB & I inspected ticket prices and times and weighed our options. We eventually decided to stick to T’s original plan of staying overnight & taking a jeep in the morning, and left to find a hotel.
The first place we found was something with a sign on the doors which read “The Meat of the Hotel”, which turned out to be not a hotel at all, but a restaurant. One of the ladies there, though, quoted us a price for rooms and then took us around trying to find a hotel. First one we went to was full, but the second one had a common room with 30 yuan beds, which we were happy to take. T had a hurt foot, so we went up to deposit all our bags right away. It turned out to be 2 rooms; the man who showed us up very clearly indicated that PB was to stay in the room (maybe 10 or 12 beds) while T & I stayed in the smaller room (maybe 4 or 5 beds) found through a connecting door. We also had a bathroom, complete with shower. We were the only ones in the rooms.
We unpacked and rested a little before deciding to go in search of groceries for the next day. The plan was to leave bright and early the next day, get a jeep to Zamiin-Uud, and there buy a train ticket to Ulaanbataar for that evening. The train, we’d heard, was something like 15 hours long, so we decided to stock up on food and vegetables and beverages while we could.
[EDIT: Apparently my formatting earlier managed to cut off the majority of this entry. The other half of it is below.]
We went out into Er Lian and found a decent-sized convenience store that we'd passed earlier while hotel-hunting. T looked around for bread, as she didn't eat meat, and PB & I stocked up on noodles, drinks, & snack food. We were greatly helped by a 10 or 11 year-old boy in the shop who helped translate Chinese and Mongolian into English. Right before we left we noticed a felt drinking flask with ink detailing. The front of it had a small holster for chopsticks and a flap which snapped over the rim of a small drinking cup. Paul bought it for the ludicrously low sum of 25 yuan, and we were informed it was full of some sort of strange alcohol. Exciting!
Again we trekked back to our room to deposit our new riches. This time T stayed there and PB & I went out in search of dinner. We found a small restaurant and were shown which were the 'good' dishes on the menu by the pregnant waitress. These turned out to be mutton stewed on the bone with some zucchini and green peppers in a dark peppery sauce, and another dish that consisted of very thin strips of mutton almost lost in a huge mound of lightly fried onions. Both were very tasty and accompanied by small bowls of cold rice and a tea which tasted rather like bland soup stock and was drunk from small bowls (significantly larger and of a different size than the usual Chinese teacup). It was very good, as I said, and we finished nearly all of it. We paid, thanked the waitress, and returned to our room.
T, it turns out, had been travelling for 6 weeks now and will keep travelling for the next year, to a year and a half. She told us stories of some of the things she's seen in China so far, and we told her our story. I showered in the sparse bathroom, and we went to bed on mattresses that were hard and slightly too short, with Chinese (bean or sand filled [Editor's Note: possibly buckwheat]) pillows.
T & I were woken early the next morning by construction going on in the room behind us. The day dawned bright, cool, and windswept; without even stopping for breakfast, we went off at 7 am in search of a jeep across the border, armed with directions given to us by our hotel staff, who communicated with us via a web translator and a swivelling computer monitor.
The cab we got dropped us off in front of a building which was, ostensibly, the town's market, where we were immediately accosted by a local woman acting as a money changer. I changed 100 yuan into Tugriks (MNT), just to be sure to have some local money, and the lady thenceforth appointed herself our negotiator with the jeep drivers. The starting price was 120 yuan each, which we all laughed at and walked away from. It eventually made it down to 80 yuan, but then a different man came up and seemed to want to charge extra money for our bags. The price our "helper" was asking correspondingly shot up again to 100 yuan; we could not get her down past 90 after that. We had just about decided on taking the offered 90 yuan ride when a new man came up and suddenly offered 80 yuan for us and our bags included. We all jumped at it and quickly had our bags stowed in the back and T and I in the front passenger seat, whose previous occupant was relegated to the back storage area. PB got squeezed in the middle and everyone was happy, except for our "helper" who was pitching a fit at being undersold and was yelling at our driver, even walking along beside the jeep so he couldn't close his door as he tried to drive away. He eventually handed her 10 yuan and she left. We were on our way.
About 15 minutes drive later we got to the border, a very soviet structure with a huge artificial rainbow arcing over it for some unknown damn reason. Here it seemed everything was going well until the young Chinese border guard looked in our vehicle and managed to mix both youthful outrage and practiced vindictiveness in denying our driver permission to continue on (it should perhaps be mentioned that, including the driver, we had about 9 people packed into a vehicle meant for 5, and that we'd also had 2 boxes of oranges placed on the hood of the car as freight). He continued his vehemence even in the face of offered bribery from our driver, and, at shift change some minutes later, pointed out to his replacement ourselves and another car that he'd sentenced to the same fate, to be sure that our punishment continued.
Which it did, for some time. As the minutes passed I mostly stayed outside, though there was a brisk wind that tossed sand around. We saw an Irishman on a bike (he'd been on a bike for about 2 years, he told us afterwards) get refused entry because he wasn't in a car. We later saw him holding a jeep door closed against his knees, his bike on the hood of the jeep. We saw a Chinese army higher-up have a photo shoot as he waved cars by. A girl in a yellow shirt who was fuming in our car about the wait eventually got off and into another vehicle. A while after another girl followed suit.
I have to say I had a certain amount of passivity about the situation, but T was obviously getting frustrated and PB eventually got out of the car to go "speak foreign" [Editor's Note: This is a term PB and I came up with to describe the mix of simple nouns, facial expressions, and hand gestures used to communicate with someone with whom you have no language in common. There's a real knack to it!] to the driver, who'd been standing outside smiling and chatting on the cellphone for some time, to ask when, if ever, we were going to get through. We were in the car, T and I, so we couldn't hear what was being said, but at one point it looked as though PB did gangsta-gun-hands and offered to shoot the border guard. So there was some levity to the situation, at least.
Eventually we got waved through; by that time we had only 7 people and the fruit crates had disappeared from the hood of the car. With the exception of a guy with a dirt stash and a sweet scorpion tattoo in front of us at customs, the rest of the ride to Zamiin-Uud passed uneventfully, albeit with T on my lap.
[Journal entry continued on 2011/July/10]
We were dropped off in the town square, right by the train station, and decided to forego food in lieu of buying tickets for that day's train. We saw a group of people outside the station who told us that hard seats were still available, and that the ticket counter was on the second floor. There was an ATM on the first floor that wouldn't recognise PB's card; I went to the bank next door to change my thousand-odd yuan into tugriks. That done, we three headed upstairs to buy tickets.
Okay, honestly, I am in pain from my neck to my ankles right now from a 7-hour, 40 km horse ride we did yesterday. I'm bored writing about Zamiin-Uud. Here's the high lights:
-The ticket lady was a toxic mixture between Dixon the apathetic US border guard and Nurse Ratchett. What a treasure.
-We stood in line from 11:30 to 1 pm with no food or sign of hope (despite an evil line switch perpetrated by the ticket lady)
-Tickets for that day sold out, purportedly. We gave up and sat around, as apparently tickets for the next day would only be sold at some as-yet-undetermined time later that afternoon.
-In the line we met a large American named Eric, a lithe Spanish woman named Mariella and her unendingly patient husband, and a young Brit named Doug
-We were observed by an inquisitive Mongolian in a blue jacket while we played Dou Di Zout with 3 crazy-haired Isrealis, who were also waiting for tickets.
-PB, T, and I went to 5 different hotels in the area; all were booked full or asking 45 000 tugrik, an astronomical amount.
-We were saved by Doug, whose friend of a friend in Ulaan Bataar had a friend in town who got he and Eric (who'd attached himself to Doug as a kindly uncle-type) a room for 5 people for the night for 19 000 tugrik, train ticket for the next day included.
-Doug turns out to be hilarious and VERY upper class but super cool
-Eric is nice but Overly American
-Zamiin-Uud is a hole because:
10: There is no such thing as being helpful.
9: No one understands the concept of waiting in a line.
8: The internet managed to be down for 22 of the 30 hours we were there.
7: The train station announcer is an obnoxious sadist.
6: The statues in its park are ridiculous.
5: Plants cannot grow in the sand and constant wind.
4: There is broken glass booze bottles everywhere, except where there is sand. And under the sand is more glass.
3: The houses look like they belong on one of the more terrible reserves, except the government was never racist against Zamiin-Uud.
2: There are 20 different concenience stores for a "city" of about 1000 people, and none of them sell fruit. Only candy and booze.
1: Because it's Zamiin-Uud.
Anyway, the next day - the 7th of July - we got on the 15-hour train out, and after a bit of fanagling managed to get seats all together. We met a dude name Dorj who played Dou Di Zou with us and zoomed through PB's photos. He also flipped through PB's deck of cards that had all the different Emperor's of China on them, and pointed out the Mongolians in the bunch.
PB and I slept on our air mattresses on the floor between bunks, but drew a small crowd of observers when we shared a bowl of vodka before turning in. We got into Ulaan Bataar around 9:30ish the next morning, exhausted, dirty, baffled, but still essentially on time. We said goodbye to Eric and Doug, and, as is often the way of acquaintances made while travelling, have never yet seen either of them again.
On the seventh of July, 2011, I sat on one of four mattresses in a room where 5 people were staying, my back to the wall, my feet hanging over the side of one of the 4 beds, and wrote the following disgruntled entry in my journal:
"7 July:
So, we’re in Zamiin-Uud. It is a podunk border town with neither charm nor utility.
Here’s what happened after I last wrote.
At around 9pm we arrived in Er Lian. We got off the train in the hopes of buying a ticket to continue on. As we walked out, though, it occurred to us to maybe ask the train attendants whether we could just stay on for a fee and we turned back. As we did we saw another Westerner, a woman of about 5’ 1’’ with freckles and brown-red hair tied back in a ponytail. We decided to ask her if she knew whether we could buy tickets on the train, but it turns out she was going to stay the night there and continue on to Zamiin-Uud by jeep in the morning. We asked if she’d like to share a jeep, as this seemed a good cost-saving idea. We agreed, and left the station.
We’d thought there would be taxis in the station parking lot, and perhaps some hotels, but there was nothing. Instead we decided to double check whether we could buy train tickets and started wandering in search of a ticket counter at the same time a bunch of Isrealis who we’d met on the train, and a bunch of other Westerners, poured out the station doors as well. It turns out that the train we were on was the trans-siberian, and they ditch the hard-sleeper cars when they hit the border; if you want to stay on till Ulaanbataar, you have to pay luxury prices, about 1000 yuan. So we all went into the international ticket hall, and then had to come back out and leave our bags, then go back in through a scanner, to try and buy tickets.
Except none of the ticket counters were open. In fact, nothing was open, and after a flurry of activity caused by the baggage scanner turning back on and us having to scan all our baggage, nothing at all happened for the next 15 minutes except discussion. 'T', the girl we’d met earlier, who turned out to be from San Francisco, and PB & I inspected ticket prices and times and weighed our options. We eventually decided to stick to T’s original plan of staying overnight & taking a jeep in the morning, and left to find a hotel.
The first place we found was something with a sign on the doors which read “The Meat of the Hotel”, which turned out to be not a hotel at all, but a restaurant. One of the ladies there, though, quoted us a price for rooms and then took us around trying to find a hotel. First one we went to was full, but the second one had a common room with 30 yuan beds, which we were happy to take. T had a hurt foot, so we went up to deposit all our bags right away. It turned out to be 2 rooms; the man who showed us up very clearly indicated that PB was to stay in the room (maybe 10 or 12 beds) while T & I stayed in the smaller room (maybe 4 or 5 beds) found through a connecting door. We also had a bathroom, complete with shower. We were the only ones in the rooms.
We unpacked and rested a little before deciding to go in search of groceries for the next day. The plan was to leave bright and early the next day, get a jeep to Zamiin-Uud, and there buy a train ticket to Ulaanbataar for that evening. The train, we’d heard, was something like 15 hours long, so we decided to stock up on food and vegetables and beverages while we could.
[EDIT: Apparently my formatting earlier managed to cut off the majority of this entry. The other half of it is below.]
We went out into Er Lian and found a decent-sized convenience store that we'd passed earlier while hotel-hunting. T looked around for bread, as she didn't eat meat, and PB & I stocked up on noodles, drinks, & snack food. We were greatly helped by a 10 or 11 year-old boy in the shop who helped translate Chinese and Mongolian into English. Right before we left we noticed a felt drinking flask with ink detailing. The front of it had a small holster for chopsticks and a flap which snapped over the rim of a small drinking cup. Paul bought it for the ludicrously low sum of 25 yuan, and we were informed it was full of some sort of strange alcohol. Exciting!
Again we trekked back to our room to deposit our new riches. This time T stayed there and PB & I went out in search of dinner. We found a small restaurant and were shown which were the 'good' dishes on the menu by the pregnant waitress. These turned out to be mutton stewed on the bone with some zucchini and green peppers in a dark peppery sauce, and another dish that consisted of very thin strips of mutton almost lost in a huge mound of lightly fried onions. Both were very tasty and accompanied by small bowls of cold rice and a tea which tasted rather like bland soup stock and was drunk from small bowls (significantly larger and of a different size than the usual Chinese teacup). It was very good, as I said, and we finished nearly all of it. We paid, thanked the waitress, and returned to our room.
T, it turns out, had been travelling for 6 weeks now and will keep travelling for the next year, to a year and a half. She told us stories of some of the things she's seen in China so far, and we told her our story. I showered in the sparse bathroom, and we went to bed on mattresses that were hard and slightly too short, with Chinese (bean or sand filled [Editor's Note: possibly buckwheat]) pillows.
T & I were woken early the next morning by construction going on in the room behind us. The day dawned bright, cool, and windswept; without even stopping for breakfast, we went off at 7 am in search of a jeep across the border, armed with directions given to us by our hotel staff, who communicated with us via a web translator and a swivelling computer monitor.
The cab we got dropped us off in front of a building which was, ostensibly, the town's market, where we were immediately accosted by a local woman acting as a money changer. I changed 100 yuan into Tugriks (MNT), just to be sure to have some local money, and the lady thenceforth appointed herself our negotiator with the jeep drivers. The starting price was 120 yuan each, which we all laughed at and walked away from. It eventually made it down to 80 yuan, but then a different man came up and seemed to want to charge extra money for our bags. The price our "helper" was asking correspondingly shot up again to 100 yuan; we could not get her down past 90 after that. We had just about decided on taking the offered 90 yuan ride when a new man came up and suddenly offered 80 yuan for us and our bags included. We all jumped at it and quickly had our bags stowed in the back and T and I in the front passenger seat, whose previous occupant was relegated to the back storage area. PB got squeezed in the middle and everyone was happy, except for our "helper" who was pitching a fit at being undersold and was yelling at our driver, even walking along beside the jeep so he couldn't close his door as he tried to drive away. He eventually handed her 10 yuan and she left. We were on our way.
About 15 minutes drive later we got to the border, a very soviet structure with a huge artificial rainbow arcing over it for some unknown damn reason. Here it seemed everything was going well until the young Chinese border guard looked in our vehicle and managed to mix both youthful outrage and practiced vindictiveness in denying our driver permission to continue on (it should perhaps be mentioned that, including the driver, we had about 9 people packed into a vehicle meant for 5, and that we'd also had 2 boxes of oranges placed on the hood of the car as freight). He continued his vehemence even in the face of offered bribery from our driver, and, at shift change some minutes later, pointed out to his replacement ourselves and another car that he'd sentenced to the same fate, to be sure that our punishment continued.
Which it did, for some time. As the minutes passed I mostly stayed outside, though there was a brisk wind that tossed sand around. We saw an Irishman on a bike (he'd been on a bike for about 2 years, he told us afterwards) get refused entry because he wasn't in a car. We later saw him holding a jeep door closed against his knees, his bike on the hood of the jeep. We saw a Chinese army higher-up have a photo shoot as he waved cars by. A girl in a yellow shirt who was fuming in our car about the wait eventually got off and into another vehicle. A while after another girl followed suit.
I have to say I had a certain amount of passivity about the situation, but T was obviously getting frustrated and PB eventually got out of the car to go "speak foreign" [Editor's Note: This is a term PB and I came up with to describe the mix of simple nouns, facial expressions, and hand gestures used to communicate with someone with whom you have no language in common. There's a real knack to it!] to the driver, who'd been standing outside smiling and chatting on the cellphone for some time, to ask when, if ever, we were going to get through. We were in the car, T and I, so we couldn't hear what was being said, but at one point it looked as though PB did gangsta-gun-hands and offered to shoot the border guard. So there was some levity to the situation, at least.
Eventually we got waved through; by that time we had only 7 people and the fruit crates had disappeared from the hood of the car. With the exception of a guy with a dirt stash and a sweet scorpion tattoo in front of us at customs, the rest of the ride to Zamiin-Uud passed uneventfully, albeit with T on my lap.
[Journal entry continued on 2011/July/10]
We were dropped off in the town square, right by the train station, and decided to forego food in lieu of buying tickets for that day's train. We saw a group of people outside the station who told us that hard seats were still available, and that the ticket counter was on the second floor. There was an ATM on the first floor that wouldn't recognise PB's card; I went to the bank next door to change my thousand-odd yuan into tugriks. That done, we three headed upstairs to buy tickets.
Okay, honestly, I am in pain from my neck to my ankles right now from a 7-hour, 40 km horse ride we did yesterday. I'm bored writing about Zamiin-Uud. Here's the high lights:
-The ticket lady was a toxic mixture between Dixon the apathetic US border guard and Nurse Ratchett. What a treasure.
-We stood in line from 11:30 to 1 pm with no food or sign of hope (despite an evil line switch perpetrated by the ticket lady)
-Tickets for that day sold out, purportedly. We gave up and sat around, as apparently tickets for the next day would only be sold at some as-yet-undetermined time later that afternoon.
-In the line we met a large American named Eric, a lithe Spanish woman named Mariella and her unendingly patient husband, and a young Brit named Doug
-We were observed by an inquisitive Mongolian in a blue jacket while we played Dou Di Zout with 3 crazy-haired Isrealis, who were also waiting for tickets.
-PB, T, and I went to 5 different hotels in the area; all were booked full or asking 45 000 tugrik, an astronomical amount.
-We were saved by Doug, whose friend of a friend in Ulaan Bataar had a friend in town who got he and Eric (who'd attached himself to Doug as a kindly uncle-type) a room for 5 people for the night for 19 000 tugrik, train ticket for the next day included.
-Doug turns out to be hilarious and VERY upper class but super cool
-Eric is nice but Overly American
-Zamiin-Uud is a hole because:
10: There is no such thing as being helpful.
9: No one understands the concept of waiting in a line.
8: The internet managed to be down for 22 of the 30 hours we were there.
7: The train station announcer is an obnoxious sadist.
6: The statues in its park are ridiculous.
5: Plants cannot grow in the sand and constant wind.
4: There is broken glass booze bottles everywhere, except where there is sand. And under the sand is more glass.
3: The houses look like they belong on one of the more terrible reserves, except the government was never racist against Zamiin-Uud.
2: There are 20 different concenience stores for a "city" of about 1000 people, and none of them sell fruit. Only candy and booze.
1: Because it's Zamiin-Uud.
Anyway, the next day - the 7th of July - we got on the 15-hour train out, and after a bit of fanagling managed to get seats all together. We met a dude name Dorj who played Dou Di Zou with us and zoomed through PB's photos. He also flipped through PB's deck of cards that had all the different Emperor's of China on them, and pointed out the Mongolians in the bunch.
PB and I slept on our air mattresses on the floor between bunks, but drew a small crowd of observers when we shared a bowl of vodka before turning in. We got into Ulaan Bataar around 9:30ish the next morning, exhausted, dirty, baffled, but still essentially on time. We said goodbye to Eric and Doug, and, as is often the way of acquaintances made while travelling, have never yet seen either of them again.
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